Front and Center is a groundbreaking Ms. series that offers first-person accounts of Black mothers living in Jackson, Miss., receiving a guaranteed income. First launched in 2018, the Magnolia Mother’s Trust (MMT) is about to enter its fifth cohort, bringing the number of moms served to more than 400 and making it the longest-running guaranteed income program in the country. Across the country, guaranteed income pilots like MMT are finding that recipients are overwhelmingly using their payments for basic needs like groceries, housing and transportation. "Once I have my degree, I'm planning to ..read more

Research shows that among college students, women report more mental health issues than men. The work to protect women’s bodies is so important and still needed—but it is also important that we take steps to proactively protect the mental health of our female students.  The year I went up for tenure, I had a series of unexpected and traumatic experiences. I know I am not the only faculty to experience a mental health breakdown at a high-stress and highly important time in my academic career. In fact, mental health problems in academia are under-discussed and relatively common.  The p ..read more

When Rep. Marilyn Lands won her race for the 10th District seat in Alabama in March with 63 percent of the vote, she did not expect to beat her Republican opponent by such a large margin. After having an abortion herself, Lands made reproductive freedom the heart of her winning campaign this year. She has found that sharing her story has had a profound impact on her relationship with voters. The post ‘For the First Time in a Long Time, They Have Hope in Alabama’: What Rep. Marilyn Lands’ Win Means to Voters appeared first on Ms. Magazine ..read more

In February, Texas attorney Mason Herring pleaded guilty to slipping abortion-inducing pills into his wife Catherine Herring's drink without her knowledge or consent. She subsequently gave birth to a baby 10 weeks premature with significant developmental delays. Catherine Herring’s brother, Thomas Pressly, a Republican state senator from Louisiana, drafted a bill in collaboration with Louisiana Right to Life which creates the new crime of “coerced abortion by means of fraud.” Although the bill was initially framed narrowly in terms of holding men such as Herring accountable for heinous be ..read more

A lot has been said (and none good) about Kansas City Chief’s kicker, Harrison Butker’s dystopian and controversial commencement speech at Benedictine College. There was a lot to dislike. He claimed abortion, IVF, surrogacy and euthanasia come from “the pervasiveness of disorder.” He trashed birth control and took a swipe at the LGBTQ community.  What garnered the most attention was this: “I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you. Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you ..read more

According to the Ms. Summer 2024 cover story: “Menopause is not an afterthought for us. Nor can we continue to tolerate being society’s afterthought.” In the upcoming issue, you can also read about the coalition of governors that’s determined to protect the abortion rights and reproductive freedom of all Americans; best practices for early cancer screening; and combatting the silence around Hamas’ sexual violence on and following Oct. 7. Join the Ms. community today and you’ll get issues delivered straight to your mailbox! When you become a member, you’re supporting independent, feminist ..read more

From the Winter 2015 issue of Ms.: Patrisse Cullors, along with Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi, created the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag and organized the Black Lives Matter campaign after the 2012 killing of the unarmed young Floridian Trayvon Martin by a self-appointed vigilante. "Movement and change take a significant amount of time," said Cullors. "We are in a state of emergency, [but] things take decades, centuries to change. To unearth those systems––racism, patriarchy, transphobia––takes consistency and perseverance.”  (For more ground-breaking stories like this, order 50 YEARS OF  ..read more

We currently have zero Black women governors and only one Black woman in the Senate. But that could soon change. This week, exciting news came out of Maryland’s Democratic primary race: U.S. Senate candidate Angela Alsobrooks won big despite being outspent 10 to 1 by her opponent, Rep. David Trone, a wealthy businessman who threw more than $60 million of his own money into his campaign. Alsobrooks is the county executive for Maryland’s second-largest county, and this win means she, along with Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester, could become the United States’ fourth and fifth Black women to ever serve ..read more

Weekend Reading for Women's Representation is a compilation of stories about women's representation.  This week: why expanding women’s power isn’t a single-issue effort but is a prerequisite to progress across the board; the number of women running for the U.S. House is down, with Republican women seeing the greatest decline; Prince George’s county executive Angela Alsobrooks won an impressive victory in the U.S. Senate primary; Suzanne LaFrance on track to be Anchorage's first woman mayor; in North Macedonia, where Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova became the first woman preside ..read more

Roe v. Wade was overturned on June 24, 2022. But according to Shefali Luthra, author of Undue Burden: Life and Death Decisions in Post-Roe America, “it had been on the verge of collapse for decades.” After all, most Medicaid recipients had lost insurance coverage for the procedure in 1977 and a plethora of restrictions—from parental consent and notification requirements for minors, to mandated counseling sessions to dissuade people from ending their pregnancies—had long kept procedural abortion out of reach for large segments of the population. Undue Burden digs into t ..read more